Curating Collective Collections--HathiTrust Launches Its Shared Print Monograph Archive

Recent decades have witnessed significant, even transformational changes in research libraries. Chris Ferguson has characterized these changes as a massive and rapid shift from print to digital information resources, from on-site services to virtual services through the network, from an emphasis on our values and visions to those of others. Longtime independent operators that collaborated when good and necessary in a world of physical materials, research libraries' operations and collections are now beginning to mimic the networked environment of the virtual world in which they house their collections and offer service. Such print retention commitments for serials focus on the volume of space that members may recover and have met with considerable success. In concentrating on serials, however, they leave vulnerable to loss far less commonly held titles, including many serials to be sure but also a range of other material types, in particular, monographs, for which distribution patterns, rates of duplication, traditional management strategies, and the prospect of space gain are very different from serials.